More Emails Released by State Dept. Contradict Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi Testimony

Alex Wong/Getty Images3 Nov 2015

A new batch of emails from Hillary Clinton’s server contradict the official media narrative that Hillary Clinton did a great job in her testimony before the House Benghazi Committee, answering an assortment of questions regarding reckless sharing of classified information.

First, the emails described by Fox News contradict Clinton’s statements about the role played by Sidney Blumenthal. At the House Benghazi Committee hearing, Clinton described Blumenthal as an informal correspondent. “He’s a friend of mine. He sent me information he thought might be of interest,” she said. “Some of it was, some of it wasn’t, some of it I forwarded to be followed up on. He had no official position in the government. And he was not at all my adviser on Libya.”

However, Fox News spotted some emails that showed Blumenthal advocating a no-fly zone over Libya in early 2011, and the Secretary of State passing it along to her deputy chief of staff as a serious policy proposal, asking, “What do you think of this idea?”

Another email chain has Blumenthal serving as a back-channel intermediary to connect Clinton with a former senior British government official, who wanted to arrange negotiations between the Libyan insurgency and the government of Moammar Qaddafi. As Catherine Herridge of Fox News notes, this is very difficult to square with Clinton’s assurances that Blumenthal was “not at all my adviser on Libya.”

The emails show some correspondence from slain Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens reaching Clinton, which contradicts her statements to the Benghazi committee that she did not see the six hundredrequests he sent for advanced security, because she did not deal directly with him. In one case, she responded to an email he sent about humanitarian aid to Libyans, after the overthrow of Qaddafi, within a matter of minutes.

The emails include a mixture of personal and serious correspondence, which sometimes mixes in very odd ways. For example, one email chain begins with Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin sending her a link to a story about the attempted assassination of the head of the Libyan Army. Clinton’s response asks Abedin if she has gotten any home decorating advice from Chelsea Clinton and devolves into a discussion about the price of designer lamps.

The latest round of released emails also includes still more documentation that Clinton and her department knew the “spontaneous video protest” story was false, right from the start. The Washington Examinerdescribes one of the emails as suggesting “Hillary Clinton’s State Department was advised to tell two different stories about what sparked the 2012 Benghazi terror attack: one to the U.S., and another in Libya.”